Postage meters are devices for dispensing value in the form of postage printed on a mailpiece such as an envelope. Postage meters of this type print and account for postage (value) dispensed by using a vault within the postage meter. The postage is included as part of a postage indicium that may also include a date and/or time associated with the printing of the indicium, a mailed from zip code, a postage meter identification number, and encrypted data that can be used by the cognizant postal authority to verify the authenticity of the printed indicium.
While postage meters have performed exceptionally well over the years, occasionally an indicium that is unreadable is printed even though the postage has been accounted for in the postage meter vault. This situation can occur, for example, where an ink supply associated with the printing device of the postage meter runs low thereby resulting in a poor printed image. When such a situation occurs, the user of the postage meter must save the mailpiece containing the unreadable indicium and bring it to the postal authority in order to obtain a refund for the value of the postage associated with the mailpiece. This process is obviously very time consuming and a big inconvenience to the user.
It is therefore desirable to provide a method and apparatus for a postage metering system that accommodates postage refund requests in a more efficient manner than the procedures outlined above.